News

With Berkeley’s biggest neighbor planning to add over two million square feet of girth in the coming 15 years, residents gathered Wednesday to tell UC Berkeley to slow down before it gobbles the town whole.
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After 31 years as one of the nation’s most prestigious centers for foreigners to come and learn the English language, class was officially dismissed at Berkeley’s English Language Program (ELP) Thursday.
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The Florida version of the 2000 presidential election proved that punch cards are problematic. California’s adventures with touchscreen voting machines—including what amounts to a blanket decertification by the California secretary of state—demonstrated that this form of tally has some problems as well. Paper balloting seems a relic of the distant past. With the November general elections quickly approaching, many are wondering how they can ensure that their votes actually are counted.
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The proposed fiscal year 2005 City of Berkeley budget presented to the City Council by City Manager Phil Kamlarz Tuesday night erases Berkeley’s $10 million general fund deficit without reducing—as some citizens had feared—fire services or eliminating school crossing guards. What it does to other city jobs is another question.
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Berkeley’s budget mess is proving difficult to solve, but easy to trace. The city, like 248 other local agencies, has gambled and so far lost on a hastily passed 2000 state law to boost employee retirement benefits on the promise that the state retirement fund had the cash reserves to cover their short term costs.
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There is videotape of the beatings by the six guards, available on the Internet for download. Soft and grainy and shot from a distance, still, what is happening is unmistakable. Two prisoners are lying sprawled on the floor, face down, unresisting. An L.A. Times news article graphically describes the scene: “[One of the guards] sits astride [one of the prisoners and] begins punching him with alternating fists, landing a total of 28 blows. At one point, [the guard] can be seen lifting [the prisoner’s] head by the hair in what looks like an effort to get a better angle for his punch. A few feet away, the tape shows [a second guard] slugging [the other prisoner] and using his right knee to pummel him in the neck area as the [prisoner] lies motionless. … One [guard] is seen shooting the [prisoners] with a gun that fires balls of pepper spray, while another sprays their faces with mace.”
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Millions of witnesses were shocked by the graphic photographs of American soldiers reveling in the vicious torture and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, a U.S.-run prison outside Baghdad, notorious for torture and massive executions under Saddam Hussein. The photographs depicted images of a prisoner, his head covered in a Ku Klux Klan-style hood with wires fixed to his fingers, toes and genitals; nude inmates piled in a human pyramid; a triumphant soldier named Chip Frederick sitting on top of a naked prisoner while Private Lynndie England shows a “thumbs up” sign while pointing to the genitals of a detainee forced to masturbate; a dog attacking a prisoner; stripped inmates being forced to simulate sex with each other and beat one another.
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The recent commentary in the Berkeley Daily Planet by opponents of the new Shasta Fire Station is proof that anti-civic behavior does not die easily. These opponents, having watched a failed appeal to the City Council and a failed law suit against the city (by individuals) to block construction of the fire station, are now attempting a last stand by discrediting the results of an exhaustive four-year public process that produced the program and final design for the new fire station. They are now arguing that the station is unnecessarily large and that the city should not be spending money in tight financial times. They say that the new station will be “an oversized, exorbitantly expensive building” even though it is being built in an area where some of the houses are larger then the size of the new station. Let’s be clear: this is not a group of concerned citizens trying to protect the city’s financial interest but some of the same group that have argued that “a fire station is inappropriate in our bucolic neighborhood.”
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When the Berkeley Youth Orchestra takes the stage this Sunday for their final program of the season, it’s quite possible that no one will be having more fun than the performer in the spotlight, 13-year old Jasiu Purat. The winner of the orchestra’s concerto competition, Purat defies cliches of the talented young musician under pressure to excel. Instead, he simply describes his musical activities as opportunities to enjoy himself.
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Impact Theatre is up to another one of its delightful pieces of nonsense, the three part Money and Run, staging it—as usual—at La Val’s Subterranean Theatre. That’s what the pizza parlor on Euclid Avenue has dubbed the small black stage in its basement where so many good theater companies spend time while they work their way up the theatrical ladder to more awe-inspiring quarters. But Director Christopher Morrison isn’t much interested in that stepping-stone kind of thing.
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Voters here in Berkeley and throughout Alameda county could be back to voting on paper in the November elections, according to a stunning, far-reaching ruling last week by California Secretary of State Kevin Shelly.
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While critics of UC Berkeley’s recently released Long Range Development Plan fear the university’s vision for Berkeley amounts to a parking space for every car and a traffic jam for every street, a local legislator—Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley)—is pushing a state bill that would require the university to pay Berkeley for those and other headaches caused by its continued growth within the city.
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Thanks to an outpouring of support from the community and a little clever detective work, a potentially bad story turned good late last week after three local students had their instruments stolen from St. Joseph the Worker Church.
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Thanks to an outpouring of support from the community and a little clever detective work, a potentially bad story turned good late last week after three local students had their instruments stolen from St. Joseph the Worker Church.
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On the otherwise gray wall of the Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity house is a painting of the U.S. Marines struggling to raise the American flag at Iwo Jima. Beside the painting is a testimonial to fraternity brother Colonel Harry Liversedge, who “led U.S. forces” in the famous World War II battle.
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On Cinco de Mayo 1862 at Puebla, in southeastern Mexico, a conquest army of 6,000 seasoned French soldiers funded by Emperor Napoleon III of France, and marching at behest of Archduke Maximilian of Austria, met 4,000 Mexican defenders who were mostly last minute recruits from the barrios of Puebla. The invaders were headed for Mexico City 60 miles away to install Maximilian Emperor of Mexico. They expected little resistance. French General Charles Ferdinande de Lorencez had declared, upon landing of his troops at the port of Veracruz, that because Mexicans were merely “bloodthirsty half-castes who united the vices of the white man with the savageness of the Indian... We are so superior to the Mexicans in race, in organization, in discipline, (and) in morality...that, at the head of 6,000 soldiers, I am already master of Mexico.”
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When a suicide bomber parked a van disguised as an ambulance in front of the Shaheen Hotel in the Karadah neighborhood of Baghdad on January 28 and blew himself up, he killed four people and wounded scores of others.
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For a long while now, her neighbors envied her. While they suffered under colonial rules, she alone in Southeast Asia developed independently and in peace. While they suffered from insurgencies and warfare, torn apart by opposing Cold War ideologies, she grew in confidence and sophistication, all the while under a constitutional monarchy. Indeed, by all geopolitical standards, Thailand seems a blessed country.
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Ten years ago this week my husband Ralph had an accident that left him a C-4 quadriplegic. Cruising down Claremont Avenue on his Italian racing bike, just above the Claremont Hotel, his front tire went flat and he sailed over the handlebars, landing in the middle of the road. He slipped in and out of consciousness until a passerby discovered him and called 911. An ambulance picked him up and delivered him to Highland Hospital, where emergency room doctors monitored his vital signs. When I arrived at the emergency room the prognosis was not good. I was warned that he might not make it, then later informed that if he did pull through he wouldn’t be able to use his arms and hands again. Twenty-four hours later we were told that he would probably remain paralyzed from the neck down.
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Iraq can quickly move to democracy if it is based on small groups rather than the mass democracy practiced throughout the world today. Small-group voting can be implemented quickly, at low cost. A bottom-up election process can create a democratic legislature in Iraq by June 30, in time for the planned transfer of sovereignty to Iraq.
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Our city is in a financial crisis and we are being told that there may have to be cuts in vital services and a tax increase. Under these circumstances is it right to be planning a $5-$6 million replacement fire station in Fire District 7? The facility to be built in northeast Berkeley will have 7,200 square feet and 1,500 square feet of decks and will house three Berkeley engines. The three-person crew will, in addition to the decks, have 3,200 square feet of living space. The project has been presented as the additional multi-jurisdictional station specified by 1992’s bond Measure G. It is, however, called “Replacement Station No. 7.” Bond money will indeed pay for the construction, but let us remember that bond money is a loan and our taxes pay the principal and interest on that loan. Furthermore, the costs of maintenance and operation must also be paid for with our taxes that fund the city’s already inadequate yearly operating budget—the same budget that currently cannot pay for all our vital services, let alone the additional costs this project will incur!
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At the end of April 2004, I resigned as president of Berkeley High School Parent Teacher Student Association because I got fed up with being called names and threatened because I have been preaching to the district that something should be done about the high percentage of black children behind at our elementary schools in math and reading. I have been called anti-Semitic, a racist and other names that cannot be printed here. The most recent one is that I am too emotional to be president of the PTSA.
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This spring, the Berkeley High School theater department is putting on an impressive world-premiere musical, called Man In The Musical. The ambitious and well-done show was written by Bay Area natives Phil Gorman and Lila Tschappat.
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One of the highlights of the 29th annual Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association 29th Spring House Tour on Sunday, May 9, is the Tape House on Russell Street near Shattuck Avenue. It was once the home of the pioneering Tape family.
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Anyone who passed through Austin during the glory years of the Texan counterculture will remember the establishment called Armadillo World Headquarters. Well, there’s a spot in Berkeley that I’ve begun to think of as Salamander World Headquarters. (No, y ou can’t get Lone Star or Shiner Bock there.) It’s the courtyard of a nondescript south-of-Campus apartment complex that has some irresistible attraction for salamanders. A friend who lives there keeps finding them: mostly arboreal salamanders, although a slender salamander turned up a few weeks ago.
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Opinion

Editorials

Wow. It looks like the aging but still potent Disney megacorp might finally have met its match. Here at the Daily Planet alone we got a bunch of letters expressing outrage about Disney’s decision to bar its subsidiary Miramax from distributing Michael Moore’s new movie Fahrenheit 911. It’s an expose of, among other things, the Bush family’s long history of palling around with the Bin Ladens of Saudi Arabia. (Yes, those Bin Ladens.) Hot stuff. The New York Times has already written an editorial denouncing Disney. Maureen Dowd has made a skewering comment in her column. FAIR, the very effective media criticism organization, has taken up the cause. The FAIR e-mail newsletter quotes Moore’s agent, Ari Emanuel, about the reason for Disney’s action: “According to Emanuel, he had a conversation last spring with Disney chief executive Michael Eisner, who asked him to cancel his deal with Miramax and ‘expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush’s brother, Jeb, is governor.’”
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The mythic history of the American Revolution which used to be taught in the elementary schools (and perhaps still is) reserved a special bad guy slot for the role of the Hessian soldiers who fought with the British against the American revolutionaries. They were “mercenaries,” hirelings who fought for money instead of for principle (like the Americans) or for king (like the Redcoats). Never mind that the major part of the payment for their services went to their German rulers, and that the Hessians themselves were poorly paid peasants. (Many of them were stranded in the United States with no way to get home when the war was over.) Americans, our teachers made clear, didn’t use mercenaries. World War II was fought by citizens, not mercenaries.
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